Following Gregg Araki’s “I Need Your Intercourse” and Cathy Yan’s “The Gallerist,” which each premiered at this yr’s Sundance Movie Pageant to blended outcomes, Geneviève Dulude-De Celles’ “Nina Roza” is the most recent 2026 movie to take a swipe on the absurdities of the up to date artwork world. Although as an alternative of counting on the scandalous machinations of satire, because the Sundance titles did, this one pivots to and later works in service of the meditative attract of grief and reminiscence drama.
Shot and set between Canada and Bulgaria, it’s the follow-up to the Montreal-based director’s first fiction characteristic, “A Colony,” which received the Crystal Bear in 2019. Like that movie and the remainder of her oeuvre, her newest is one other tender story of a protagonist caught between two worlds, an indicator motif becoming for a director who splits her time between documentary and fiction filmmaking.
The movie’s title displays that “thought of the double,” that includes two girls who appear enigmatically one and the identical to the unmoored protagonist, artwork curator Mihail, performed by Galin Stoev. One is an eight-year-old Bulgarian portray prodigy named Nina, alternately performed by twins Sofia and Ekatarina Stanina; the opposite is Mihail’s daughter Roza (Michelle Tzontchev) who’s at the moment staying with him alongside her younger son Thomas (Raphaël Fournier), after feeling adrift from the kid’s father. By way of the stark similarities and variations between the 2 girls, “Nina Roza” finds an apt symbolism for Mihail’s previous and current and seek for belongingness, however it’s unfair to recommend that Dulude-De Celles merely renders each girls as a cipher for the protagonist and the viewer.
Mihail has stored each worlds firmly separate for practically three a long time since dwelling in everlasting exile in Montreal with Roza after the demise of his Bulgarian spouse, a lot in order that he has develop into a Sofian who “thinks in French.” When Roza performs her mother’s favourite music or insists on educating her Quebec-born son to talk Bulgarian, it irritates him. The Balkan nation is a “backward place,” he tells the curious boy. It’s no shock, then, that upon studying concerning the viral work of a rural Bulgarian village woman, who has repurposed a livestock barn right into a studio, he nearly immediately assumes it’s a fraud. (Nina’s trending story, which units the film into movement, takes its cue from the real-life story of Australian baby prodigy Aelita Andre.) Quickly, Mihail travels to Bulgaria to verify his seemingly logical assumption, solely to find solutions he didn’t intend to hunt and extra questions concerning the double life he’s main and his fractured relationship with Roza, who was the identical age as Nina after they fled Bulgaria collectively.
Although the legitimacy of Nina’s summary work (painted in actual life by Montreal artist Aujeault) finally snaps into focus, “Nina Roza” is way much less drawn to fixing the suspicion than to heightening the inescapable overlap between former and present lives, between dream and actuality, within the context of grief and belated recollections, permitting for a hypnotic, plot-averse reminiscence piece akin to many an Alice Rohrwacher film. Different textures thought-about, Dulude-De Celles additionally fashions a movie about exile and estrangement and sacrificing one’s id in pursuit of self-preservation, about what a spot can do to folks.
Whereas the movie anonymizes its Canadian setting, given it’s largely introduced by inside photographs, cinematographer Alexandre Nour Desjardins shoots Bulgaria in a way that feels directly poetic and purgatorial, and maximizes the scenic fantastic thing about the countryside, with a digicam that may moderately transfer than maintain nonetheless. The general palette is subdued, steeped in classic brown, which provides Dulude-De Celles’ present-day story a timeless high quality. Solar-drenched photographs of Mihail, typically zoned out or half-asleep in transit, evoke an elusive inside world the director is making an attempt to entry and intimate, in a lot the identical means because the movie’s hazy moments, captured by an anamorphic lens, yield a transportive impact. There’s a sense that the filmmaker is intentionally slowing down the central character’s expertise of the current and due to this fact that of the viewers.
Then there’s composer Joseph Marchand’s significant mixture of a typically dreamlike rating, alongside ‘70s Bulgarian estrada, that includes Pasha Hristova’s “Edna Bulgarska Roza” and “Povei Vetre,” and conventional Bulgarian people music, like Petar Lyondev’s extensively fashionable association of “Ergen Deda,” which is way much less involved with ennobling the proceedings than it’s with reflecting Mihail’s disassociation and compelled contact with the specters of his previous — one of many uncommon events the place anachronistic needle drops really elevate a movie moderately than kneecap it.
Nevertheless, the movie’s critique of the artwork world solely decidedly crystallizes when Chiara Caselli’s Giulia, the Italian gallery proprietor representing Nina, reveals up over an hour into the 104-minute film. Recognizing that she will be able to solely play the prodigy card to promote Nina’s work for therefore lengthy, Giulia claims to present the kid’s mom an “wonderful trigger” to to migrate to Italy and virtually forge a brand new life together with her daughter within the international land. However when Mihail, feeling obliged to guard Nina, pries concerning the artwork supplier’s actual motives and whether or not she really cares concerning the younger artist’s approval, Giulia merely couches her plan when it comes to “serving to them.” “Her mom got here to me, not the opposite means round,” she asserts, pretending to be oblivious to the ability dynamics between her and the ladies she claims to assist.
The deceptively doting gallerist sees the woman as nothing however an funding, and all of the predatory scheming shouldn’t be misplaced on the precocious Nina, who’d moderately favor a pastoral life within the firm of her family and friends, all artists themselves, to Italy’s Subsequent Nice Painter, thus rejecting the solitary artist mystique. Nina form of hurls the query of authenticity again to the international tastemakers scorching on her heels. On this respect, “Nina Roza” can actually be learn as a commentary on tokenism, compelled migration, and commodity within the fashionable artwork business. A montage close to the coda reveals logistics employees fastidiously dealing with, labeling, and transporting Nina’s work for the forthcoming exhibit hundreds of miles away, and you start to wonder if gallerists, collectors, and curators worth their artists the identical means they worth their works or the tales that introduced forth such invaluable artwork. It’s an enough critique, one which I do want the languidly paced film foregrounded a bit bit extra.
Stoev and the Stanina twins (whom I hardly discover as two separate actors, not to mention twins) are mainly good; they act as if it’s not their first time sharing the display collectively. Stoev’s expressively melancholic visage remembers that of the not too long ago late Iranian legend Homayoun Ershadi in “Style of Cherry.” The film is at its most potent when it merely observes Stoev interfacing with the native villagers, most particularly the unassumingly humorous Nikolay Mutafchiev, who performs Nina’s uncle. Right here and nowhere else, Mihail experiences the sacred bond of group, of what it means to primally join with folks, in hopes of studying to be mild with oneself.
Just like the eponymous gifted woman’s work, “Nina Roza” is subtly cosmic, compelling, and impressionistic. It powerfully commits to symbolic, time-shifting thrives scattered all through its swerving narrative. It’s a work of professional kind.
Grade: B+
“Nina Roza” premiered on the 2026 Berlin Movie Pageant. It’s at the moment looking for U.S. distribution.
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